Music makes me time travel.

[TheGreek]

I just posted something on another thread about a certain track being a  means of time travel. 

 

Then I  realised that most music does this for me. Songs that I haven't heard for a while will take me back to certain times and places which nothing else does  - with the possible exception of smells and food. 

I'm sure that there's a scientific reason for this,  which TBH I'm not really bothered about.  Amazing though, don't you think?

 

Examples of tracks and where/ when they take you back to...

[Doctor J]

This is why we can be the most boring people in the world when we play people songs we love. You're playing the soundtrack to your life, the music which you associate with major moments in your history and it means nothing to them 😁

[TheGreek]

For me, "Ride on time" will always remind me of being on a kibbutz in the late 80s.

Each evening we would find another kibbutz to go to.

The Israelis would be happy to transport and accompany us as they loved the new style of dance music. We'd take our tapes and get the  "dj's" to play them. 

We had the place jumping all night till we had to leave to start work at 4.15am.

 

Great memories...

[lozkerr]

Vangelis - Memories of Green. Takes me right back to when I first heard it after buying the See You Later album in 1980. 

 

I bought it on impulse, as there was something about the bleak album cover and the disturbing photo on the inner sleeve that resonated with the lonely teenager that was me in 1980. Initially I wondered what the hell I'd wasted my money on, as the first two tracks were distinctly meh.

 

Then Memories of Green started playing and I was utterly blown away. I played it over and over again, lying on my bedroom floor in the dark listening to the rain spattering against the window. It's a melancholy and lonely-sounding piece of music, but it struck a chord with me and I've never fallen out of love with it.

Edited January 13, 2023 by lozkerr
Double word

[Lozz196]

Hanoi Rocks live album All Those Wasted Years takes me back to the summer of ‘86 when it was seldom off of my car stereo. 

[KingBollock]

One of the strongest memories caused by music also involves a smell. In 1991/2 I worked with a mobile disco. We had a couple of brilliant DJs, and I love all the pop music from then because of it. But the smell of the coconut scented smoke from the smoke machine proper does a number on my feels.

 

I actually own a smoke machine that has coconut scented smoke. It’s left over from when I put my own mobile disco together in 1999. Mainly so I could play with the lights, but also because I loved working on the earlier disco. 
 

There are some songs that I can’t listen to because they take me back to another time that hurts to think about. And they’re great songs.

[StickyDBRmf]

I'm not allowed in most of the places they take me back to.

[Waddo Soqable]

I'd say the slightly more obscure bands stuff is more time travel material, in that it's not popular nostalgia music that gets churned out on radio still today.. 23 Skiddoo, A Certain Ratio or Swamp Children always take me back to living in the Hulme crescents circa 1981.. Likewise Batsong and Darkboy by Longpig (not the later American band BTW) remind me of the old flat in Elephant & Castle a couple of years later.. 

Of course if I really could physically time travel back to the 80s, like a shot I'd do a bunk and stay there.. 😁

[SteveXFR]

Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff albums just takes me straight back to a sweaty mosh pit in Bristol Bierkeller in 1995. 

Deftones Around The Fur album takes me straight to a lads holiday in Newquay when I ditched my mates in the night club every night to go upstairs to the metal bar while they danced all night to beep and bloops.

[Mickyk]

New Gold Dream, SM ,takes me right back to Blackpool 1982,Imperial Hotel to be precise, with the Trader Jacks night club at the side what a weekend that was.

[Linus27]

I rarely get that, music just creates moods, images, visuals and emotions to me, regardless of how many times I have listened to it. Very few song remind me of a moment in time. However, two that always do is The Eurythmics- There Must Be An Angel which reminds me of my first ever school work experience when I was about 15 and Paul Young - Love of the Common People which reminds me of being in the car with my dad at Heathrow when I was 14.

[Kitsto]

Yes, music has that special ability to waft you back in time. I think it's why we have such an emotional response and tie to it.

 

It's why we (I) worship the people who make the music that does this to us (me). And also why such worship is pointless - even though I still do it: top musicians put their trousers on one leg at a time like the rest of us as Stephen King so memorably wrote about famous writers (himself included). Besides they usually have no better understanding of how they do what they do than a striker sticking the ball in the back of the net.

 

It's why I play bass and have played in a band - to see what it was like (love playing bass; hated being in a band; no rock star alternative career daydream for me).

 

EDIT: Reminds me of that Rush DVD (Rush In Rio?) where Alex Lifeson looks on bemused when fans break down in tears in front of him (and Geddy grouches round looking for a missing lucky stage shoe saying that this is definitely not documentary DVD material). 

Edited January 14, 2023 by Kitsto

[Franticsmurf]

Vangelis - Heaven and Hell. It was used in the soundtrack to Carl Sagan's Cosmos just about the time I was getting into astronomy as a kid. It usually reminds me of evenings staring at the stars through binoculars and my neighbour's telescope. 

 

Jon & Vangelis 'I'll Find My Way Home' - I used to play it every morning before going into school to do my 'O' levels. Made me feel good but didn't work miracles on the exams themselves. 😃

 

Yes, 90125 album. It was the first album I bought when I went away to college in London. I played it to death even though as a Yes fan for years, I wasn't too keen on Trevor Rabin joining them (I mellowed later after hearing ARW). 

 

In 2014 I climbed Kilimanjaro and in my head as an earworm on the summit night was 'Three Little Birds'. Not a particular favourite at the time and I'm not sure where it came from but the words were uplifting and the rhythm that I sang it in my head matched the slow plod required. I got to the top, forgot about it and when I got home I happened to hear it on the radio and all the emotion of that summit night came back in a flood of tears!

[Richard R]

Far too many!

ELO 2:  a 24hr weather monitoring overnight at school. The strange feeling laying out sleeping bags in the physics lab, and the teacher's distainful dislike of "In Old England Town".

Edited February 4, 2023 by Richard R
Typo

[jezzaboy]

Don`t go breaking my heart by Elton and Kiki. Spent a week in 1976 in a caravan in Anstruther Fife with my auntie and uncle and one of said uncle`s nephew. It seemed to always be on and whenever I here that tune, I`m right back there.

 

Which is a bit of a bugger as the auntie turned out to be a beach queen from hell in later years! 

[nilorius]

The most time-travel album for me is Eric Clapton - live album - Unplugged. It somehow gives me fealings of 1992.time, others can't.

[georgee]

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Edited August 25, 2023 by georgee

[Waddo Soqable]

Heard "Shallow Then Halo" earlier

...that had me back in a crumbling flat at the Elephant and castle 1983...

[Shaggy]

On 13/01/2023 at 18:59, TheGreek said:

I just posted something on another thread about a certain track being a  means of time travel. 

 

Then I  realised that most music does this for me. Songs that I haven't heard for a while will take me back to certain times and places which nothing else does  - with the possible exception of smells and food. 

I'm sure that there's a scientific reason for this,  which TBH I'm not really bothered about.  Amazing though, don't you think?

 

Examples of tracks and where/ when they take you back to...

 

Absolutely true; and for me the strongest associations are indelibly linked to my romantic life.   Fiction Factory’s  “Feels like heaven” completely takes me back to bittersweet memories of early 1984 when I and the first real love of my life were going through a rocky time.....🤔

 

 

On 13/01/2023 at 23:48, Mickyk said:

New Gold Dream, SM ,takes me right back to Blackpool 1982,Imperial Hotel to be precise, with the Trader Jacks night club at the side what a weekend that was.

 

My all-time favourite album, takes my right to the best summer of my life doing voluntary work at a Marine Biology station on a tiny island off SW Ireland 🙂

[LowB_FTW]

This is interesting to me, as I don't get this feeling at all when listening to any of my music.

Some of the songs/albums I still listen to were ones that were introduced to me at various stages through my life, but listening to them now doesn’t automatically take me back to any specific time.

I've recently had this conversation with my wife as she found it incredible that music doesn’t affect me in this way.

I've always been aware that music can be a conduit for people to revisit certain events in their past that the song/artist engages in the listeners brain, but it's never impacted me like this at all.

I know we are specifically talking music in this thread, but some people have mentioned smells do the same thing with them, however I have congenital anosmia (inherited from my mum) so smell has never had this impact on me either.

I can't help thinking perhaps one is related to the other, even though logically I can't make what that connection would be.

 

Mark

[Waddo Soqable]

Smells are another very potent memory trigger, I seem to remember reading somewhere that smell was supposed to be the most profound of these. 

 

[Franticsmurf]

2 hours ago, Waddo Soqable said:

Smells are another very potent memory trigger, I seem to remember reading somewhere that smell was supposed to be the most profound of these. 

 

Yes, I've read that too. There's a particular smell - a mix of rubber and a slightly metallic aroma - that immediately takes me back to when I was 10 and on the dentist having 6 teeth removed. It was the smell of the anaesthetic and the mask used to administer it. I still shudder as it was quite a traumatic experience. 

[Lozz196]

7 minutes ago, Franticsmurf said:

Yes, I've read that too. There's a particular smell - a mix of rubber and a slightly metallic aroma - that immediately takes me back to when I was 10 and on the dentist having 6 teeth removed. It was the smell of the anaesthetic and the mask used to administer it. I still shudder as it was quite a traumatic experience. 

I really hope that I never have to smell that smell again, makes me shudder too.

[Gasman]

Interesting that this topic seems to have brought out a couple of spammers @redpolo and @georgee... 

 

Talking of whom reminded me that the Sweet Things album from Georgie Fame was the go-to accompaniment behind frantic revising for my law degree finals, I still have that vinyl album 50+ years later but can’t listen to it without getting an attack of pre-match nerves...

[diskwave]

Whole clutch of chart pop from summer of 76  when I was strawberry picking. Brothers Johnston in particular....Places me right there like it was yesterday. Then a couple years later hearing Powerage for the first time....again I'm straight back there with my first band as we try to learn Deni Deni...Haha grt stuff.